a line made by walking

(making the world)

For the longest time, I kept a black and white postcard on my desk — a photograph entitled ‘A Line Made By Walking’ by Bristol artist Richard Long. Bought over twenty years ago (at an RWA exhibition I saw with the boy who later became my husband), the postcard shows a piece that Long made in 1967 when he was an art student at St Martin’s. By walking backwards and forwards in a field of grass, he created a line in the landscape. I don’t recall what first drew me to ‘A Line Made by Walking’, but I have thought of it often since.

For me, Long’s field calls to mind the tall grass of the meadow behind my childhood home, in which I played with my brother and our friends, but it could represent almost any place or time. The path in the photograph is timeless, haunting in its simplicity. Flattening the grass creates physical change, albeit impermanent, but walking also connects body with mind — this line in the grass embodies a line of thought. Walking, Rebecca Solnit wrote in Wanderlust, ‘is a mode of making the world as well as being in it’.

Yesterday, having spent a day at my desk, researching, puzzling and making notes, but finding myself stuck, I put down my pen and set off to collect my youngest from school. The air was cold, the rhythm of my feet on the path was steady, my frustrated mind became quiet. Suddenly, as I walked past the warmly lit windows of a pub, the key story of the piece I was working on appeared clearly in my head. Layers of thoughts had shaken down into place, teased out into a narrative thread — a line, made by walking.

Writing, I have learned, does not happen only (or even mostly) at a desk — it comes through dreaming, musing and pondering, long before the paragraphs flow. Writing is not just words on a page, it is strands of thought. I have found no better way to unfurl those tangled strands than by walking.

When I returned to my desk, I remembered the postcard, but it had inexplicably disappeared — most likely slipped between the pages of a book to mark my page. I hope to find it again one day, when I need to be reminded that I choose this work because writing — like walking — is a way of making the world as well as being in it.

Thank you for reading,

Laura x